Why prisons hold playwrights captive

It's not just the many companies working with prisoners – playwrights from Shakespeare to Tom Stoppard have found jails a rich source of inspiration

Tickets for the opera don't usually come with the caveat that the audience must not carry drugs or firearms. But then operas aren't usually performed in prison. Later this week, Pimlico Opera's production of Sugar – based on Some Like it Hot – opens at HMP Send near Guildford with a cast of both professionals and inmates. The company is just one of the theatre companies who work in prisons around the UK and whose merits have been much discussed – not least on this blog. That ground has been well trodden. But as Kennedy didn't quite say, we should be asking not what theatre can do for prisons but what prisons can do – and have done – for theatre. Away from the charitable aims of projects such as that run by Pimlico Opera, playwrights have found prisons to be a rich source of inspiration.

Characters in many Shakespeare plays – notably Measure for Measure, Richard III, Titus Andronicus and King Lear – end up in jail at some point. And, to choose a slightly different measure, of the plays at the National Theatre over the past year, at least two had scenes set in prison: Georg Büchner's Danton's Death, adapted by Howard Brenton, and Tom Stoppard and André Previn's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Prisons have provided playwrights with a wealth of material – from Timberlake Wertenbaker's progressive penal colony in Our Country's Good to Martin Lynch's Chronicles of Long Kesh. So what is it about incarceration that whets the writer's pen?

Read the full article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/feb/23/why-prisons-hold-playwrights-captive?CMP=twt_gu